The Shadowrun Series's PC Titles' Running

Just as a warning, today's rant has not had the benefit of having been proofread by my sister.  She was quite ill recently, and I didn't want to worsen her condition by exposing her to my ramblings while she was in a weakened state.



Picture this: you’re playing an isometric RPG where more or less every action and interaction is handled by selecting stuff with the mouse.  You want to choose your response from a list of dialogue options whilst having a conversation with a random bystander?  Select it with the mouse.  You want to bring the pain to some security goon so pathetically stricken with Stockholm Syndrome for his corporate overlords that the last thing he was doing before this fight broke out was defending Diablo Immortal on Twitter?  Make with the clicky-clicky on the bullet icon in the menu, then another clickety-clicker on the Kotick apologist.  You want to get from 1 side of the map to the other?  Scroll on over and plant that pointer right where you aim to be.

So you’re doing this.  Playing the point-and-click game, and doing it like a pro, or an amateur, because let’s face it, putting a cursor over something and hitting a button has a very low ceiling for mastery so there’s little discernible difference between an expert and a first timer.  In the first scenario, your character delivers a witty 1-liner to the NPC, and the conversation moves along.  The second, you fire a round into the corporate stan, and now Wyatt Cheng’s back to ineptly fighting his own battles. And in the last, you start making your way to your destination, sprinting so fast that an observer might think they’re witnessing a SquareEnix executive fleeing in terror from a good idea.

All’s well, right?  Expected results all around.  Great.  But oh, hey, here’s a fun idea.  Having efficiently run from 1 side of the map to the other as speedily as I move toward most things that involve ground beef, let’s now set our sights on a destination just about, say, half a screen away.  Considering the brisk pace at which we traversed the full scope of this entire area, it’ll surely be the work of a moment to cross a distance equivalent to the average driveway, right?

Wrong.  Because for some reason, any time you want to get somewhere that’s actually close by, this game reduces your pace down to about as fast as I move toward most things that don’t involve ground beef.

The game?  Shadowrun Returns.  And Shadowrun: Dragonfall.  Also Shadowrun: Hong Kong.  Basically, every PC-based Shadowrun.  They all run on the same engine, and thus all regulate your party’s sprinting based on how far away the destination is from them.

It’s 1 of those gameplay ideas that looks deceptively alright on paper, like the Tales of series’s cooking feature, or Pokemon’s HM system.  I mean, it sounds completely reasonable in theory: make the characters in the game move the fastest when they’ve got more ground to cover, and a “normal” pace over short distances.  That’ll make the travel time relatively equal each time you want to move somewhere, and equality is a good thing, right?

Unfortunately, in practice, it’s just frustrating and makes the process of moving through these games seem plodding for no reason.  First of all, the majority of your non-combat movements in the PC Shadowrun trilogy are generally going to be over more moderate distances--while crossing the entirety of the map is certainly not uncommon to be doing at any given time, most of the time you’re gonna be moving towards spots that are much closer, so the majority of your experience with your characters’ running speed is gonna be of the slow variety, so the balance of paces for which the developers seemed to be aiming is skewed noticeably, and not to the player’s benefit.  

Secondly, the glaring divide between the paces of the fastest run, and the “normal” speed, does not help matters.  Even if the majority of your commute wasn’t spent on crossing small distances and thus going at the slower jog, it’d still be at least a little annoying to see the sprinting that the game CAN provide, and yet have it frequently deny that pace to you for basically no reason.  I’M the one playing the damn game, so why am I not the one deciding how much hustle to apply to any given situation?  You’ve shown me that you CAN move my characters faster, so why am I not allowed to?

Third, I gotta say, even outside of the perception of slowness created by the first 2 issues, the basic pace of Shadowrun characters is objectively too damn slow.  I feel like the game industry moves toward ethical standards of conduct faster than a Shadowrun protagonist crosses the street.  These damn games take place in major urban centers, in the gritty, fast-paced setting of cyberpunk corporate dystopia; where the fuck is the hurried, frenzied lifestyle that this setting implies?  For the love of Kofusachi, I’ve seen characters in slice-of-life animes glorifying the relaxed, peaceful existence of rural Japan comport themselves with greater overall speed than these constantly endangered urbanite mercenaries do in Shadowrun!

And fourth, beyond these errors in execution, the whole idea is honestly just flawed from the start.  I don’t want equity in travel times in my game.  The time it takes to get from downtown to the city limits shouldn’t be comparable to the time required to cover a city block.  Players crossing larger distances in a game expect and accept that it’s going to take a longer time because that’s how distance works.  Lowering that travel time via use of a running feature is certainly encouraged and should absolutely be mandatory, but that shouldn’t come at the cost of making other traveling longer!

There are ways to work around this whilst playing, I admit.  When playing Shadowrun titles and mods for them, I’ll generally just quickly scroll over to whatever side of the map is in the general direction that I want to go in, and let the game think I’m telling the protagonist to emulate Forrest Gump’s cross-country trek, then just have the characters cease their Usain Bolt-ing when they get to the spot I actually want them at.  But am I really supposed to be less annoyed by this situation because there’s a work-around?  Now I’m spending the entire game dragging my pointer to every corner of the map and back like I’m trying to reenact 1 of those stupid Family Circus strips following Billy’s path while also being drunk.  The fact that I can counteract 1 inconvenience by engaging in a less severe inconvenience isn’t an excuse.

Like a lot things I rant about, this doesn’t really matter, of course.  The important things about Shadowrun’s PC trilogy are their stories, characters, purposes, themes, explorations of their setting, and so on.  And on those terms, the trilogy is decent, great, and pretty good, in that order.  Still, it IS annoying, and also, just honestly really weird.  It’s not some oversight; it requires conscious effort from the developers to code a system like this, and more of that effort, for that matter, than it would have been just to create a damn run button, or a single sprinting pace.  They chose to do this, and I don’t get why, because it couldn’t have taken very long into the testing phase for it to become clear that this wasn’t a very functional system.

Shadowrun?  More like Shadowstroll.  Shadowmeander.  Shadowtoddle.